Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

students understood; they are there to help facilitate the reading. Even without any changes or additions, though, the classes are clear, imaginative, and enthralling.
    Finally, as we read these classes we can imagine a blind Professor Borges, sitting before his students, reciting in that very personal tone of voice verses of unknown Saxon poetry in their original language and participating in polemics about famous romantic poets with whom he is, perhaps today, discussing these same issues.
— MARTÍN ARIAS

BORGES IN CLASS

. . . He ðe us ðas beagas geaf . . .
Beowulf: 2635
    Editing this book was like running after a Borges who was constantly getting lost among the books in a library or—to use a metaphor dear to our writer—disappearing around corner after corner of a vast labyrinth. As soon as we found a date or a biography we were looking for, Borges would race ahead and vanish behind an unknown personage or an obscure Oriental legend. When, after looking long and hard, we found him again, he would toss us an anecdote without a date, a quote from an author, and again we would watch him disappear, escaping through the crack of a door left ajar or between rows of shelves and racks. In order to recover his words, we followed him through the pages of innumerable encyclopedias and rooms of the National Library in Buenos Aires; we searched for him in the pages of the books he wrote and in dozens of lectures and interviews he gave; we found him in his nostalgia for Latin, in the Norse sagas, and in the memories of his colleagues and friends. By the time we finally completed our task, we had traversed more than two thousand years of history, the seven seas, and the five continents. But Borges kept fleeing from us, calm and smiling. Running from ancient India to medieval Europe hadn’t tired him out. Traveling from Caedmon to Coleridge was, for him, an everyday affair.
    Two joys have been ours since completing this labor. The first is that we managed to open a door onto space and time, allowing others to peek into the classroom of the University of Buenos Aires on Calle Independencia. The second is that we were able to enjoy these classes with the same intensity as did those students who attended them more than thirty years before. Researching and revising every nook and cranny of the text caused us to unintentionally memorize every poem and every sentence, to associate each and every statement with his stories and poems, to formulate (and then often reject) innumerable hypotheses about every comma, every period, and every line.
    Borges once wrote, “That someone will repeat a cadence of Dunbar or Frost or of that man who in the middle of the night saw a tree that bleeds, the Cross, and think that they heard it for the first time from my lips. Nothing else matters to me.” 1
    Upon finishing this book, readers will find that they remember with delight lines of Wordsworth and Coleridge, that William Morris’s music has bewitched them, that characters as remote as Hugh O’Neill orHarald Hardrada have become familiar, that thanks to this most universal of Argentines, their ears echo with the crashing of weapons of the battle of Brunanburh and the Anglo-Saxon verses from “The Dream of the Rood.” Borges would surely smile, satisfied.
    In the twenty-five classes that make up this course, Borges takes us on a veritable journey through English literature, always remaining close to his own readings and the works themselves. This journey begins in the mists of time with the arrival in England of the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons; continues on to the works of Samuel Johnson; lingers on Macpherson, the romantic poets, and the Victorian era; offers a panorama of the life and works of the pre-Raphaelites; and ends at the nineteenth century, in Samoa, with one of the writers Borges held most dear, Robert Louis Stevenson.
    “I have taught exactly forty terms of English Literature at the university, but more than that I have tried to convey my love for this literature,” Borges once said. “I have preferred to teach my students, not English literature—which I know nothing about—but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. And this is enough, I think. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process. I have tried to lead my students toward it.” 2
    From the very first class it is clear that this will